Software To Track Your Preschool Payments

Income, expenses, payroll, taxes! Yikes! If you have more than 10 students in your preschool, you’ll likely want a software to track your preschool payments! This post will give you some suggestions.

Can You Just Use A Spreadsheet?

When you are just starting out, set up a simple spreadsheet in Excel or some other spreadsheet software. It could look something like this. (This is just a sample – it is not all the transactions for the entire month.)

Date	Income Type	Income Amount	Expense Type	Expense Amount
2/1	Tuition-Feb-Hamilton	$120.00
2/1	Tuition- Feb -Ames	$120.00
2/1	Tuition- Feb-Ruiz	$120.00
2/1	Tuition- Feb-Baker	$120.00
2/1	Tuition- Feb-Price	$120.00
2/1	Tuition- Feb-Lommers	$120.00
2/7			Copies	$  28.12
2/11			Paycheck	$500.00
2/13			Party Supplies	$  29.75
2/19	Tuition-Mar-Smith	$120.00
2/23			Art supplies (paint)	$  17.36
2/21	Tuition-Mar-Jones	$120.00
2/27			Liability Ins-Mar	$  67.00
TOTAL

To make this method of record keeping effective, follow these tips:

• Enter all your transactions daily, or at the very least weekly.
• Add as much detail as you need to your transaction records so that come tax time you will be able to easily know what it was for and the amount of each transaction.
• Keep all your receipts. Scanning them into a digital file is best as the ink on some receipts fades quickly.
• Triple check for accuracy when entering your amounts and when totaling your amounts.

At the end of the month, add the totals for the income and expense columns. And at the end of the year, when you need to do your taxes, you have a record of all your income and purchases.

Or You Could Use QuickBooks

QuickBooks is just one of many different kinds of financial software to use to track preschool payments. The difference between QuickBooks and a regular spreadsheet is that when you enter the information into QuickBooks, the software program will use the numbers to generate several helpful reports that can help you keep track of many aspects of your finances. It also will prompt you with questions and suggestions so you don’t miss things you may not be aware of such as tax forms.

QuickBooks seems to be the most popular of this kind of software and a simple Google search for “free QuickBooks training online” comes back with many videos, courses, and eBooks to help you learn how to use it. Once you learn the software program it is very useful for everything from payroll, to budgeting, to taxes, BUT you must take the time to learn to use the software.

And Then There’s Payroll!

While software programs can help you with payroll, there are so many things to learn about it, that it will probably be more cost effective for you to hire a bookkeeper to do payroll for you. Yes, it will cost some money, but unless you are already familiar with payroll, the time it will take you to learn how to do it correctly could be better used elsewhere.

After You Hire Your Second Teacher…

By the time you hire your second teacher it is highly recommended that you hire someone to take care of all your financial affairs—bookkeeping, payroll, and taxes. An accountant or CPA will be well worth the money compared to the time (and possibly stress) it will take you to do everything involved in keeping up with your books. Yes, you could still use a software to track your preschool payments, but you could be using your time and energy to grow your preschool instead, and let someone else do the financial job for you.